This video shows a mobile phone advert made in 2008 featuring an actor posing as Bruce Lee

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 24, 2019 at 11:00
2 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in multiple Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram posts which claim it shows late actor and martial artist Bruce Lee playing table tennis with a set of nunchucks in a rare clip filmed in 1970. The claim is false; the video shows a television advertisement for a Nokia mobile handset. The advert was made in 2008, thirty-five years after the death of Lee.

The 30-second video was published here in a Facebook post on January 23, 2018, where it has been viewed more than 35,000 times.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

The video’s caption states: “A priceless clip of 1970 of Bruce Lee playing Table Tennis with his Nan-chak !! His focus on speed.” (sic)

Bruce Lee was an actor and martial artist who died in 1973.

“Nan-Chak” refers to nunchucks or nunchaku, a Japanese martial arts weapon.

The video has also been shared elsewhere on Facebook, for example here, here and here alongside a similar claim.

The video has also been shared with the identical claims here and here on Twitter, here and here on Youtube and here and here on Instagram.

The claim is false; the video shows an advert for a mobile phone with an actor posing as Bruce Lee.

A reverse image search on Yandex using keyframes from the video obtained with video verification tool InVID and a subsequent keyword search found this longer video published on YouTube on November 18, 2008.

The video is embedded below:

The title of the video reads: “NOKIA N96 - BRUCE LEE Edition Promotion Video.”

Nokia is a Finnish communications corporation and the Nokia N96 was a mobile phone handset released by the company in 2008.

At the one minute six seconds mark of the YouTube video, traditional Chinese language text in the clip translates to English as: “The video is dedicated to Bruce Lee. The Nokia N96 Bruce Lee Limited edition has arrived.”

Below are three comparison screenshots of the video shared in misleading Facebook posts (L) and the YouTube video (R):

The advertisement for Nokia N96 was created by a marketing communication company J.Walter Thompson in 2008, thirty-five years later after the death of Bruce Lee.

In this interview with Australia based online magazine Agency Asia published on May 12, 2009, representatives for JWT’s Shanghai and Beijing team said the advert was produced as a tribute to Lee.

The advert promoted Nokia’s N96 Bruce Lee Limited edition mobile phone, according to this report published by the technology website www.gsmarena.com.

The advert was also published here on the official Bruce Lee Facebook page on April 25, 2009.

The title states: “Nokia N96 Bruce Lee vs. Ping Pong”.

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